All posts tagged Elgin

Don’t expect too much from Total’s production volumes this year: civil war, fundamentalism, nature … it seems all conspired to prevent the group from reaping the fruits of its substantial efforts of the past years to boost its output.

The French oil major’s production of hydrocarbons in the first quarter was stable from a year earlier, yet down from the previous one, and in the second quarter the group itself warned that output will be dented by the ongoing gas leaks at its Elgin platform in the North Sea, but also in Nigeria, while attacks on its Yemen installations from unidentified activists at the end of March cost the group at least five cargoes of liquefied gas.

And let’s not forget the group lost its Syrian output due to the troubled political situation there.

“There are risks to the (output) growth profile for 2012 because of what we see in Syria, Elgin,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s analyst Hootan Yazhari believes.

True, the group has been able to partially compensate the loss in volumes thanks to the ramp-up of its projects of Pazflor, in deep offshore Angola, of its Usan oilfield in Nigeria and the purchase of an additional stake of 2% in Russia’s Novatek.

Yet in the near term, there’s nothing Total can do to compensate the loss in production…

Breakfast at the Highland Hotel in Aberdeen, Scotland, starts a little earlier than at the granite city’s other hostelries.

At 05.30 each day, the hotel’s guests–mostly roustabouts and offshore workers–descend into its basement diner, bleary-eyed and already dressed for a job that will see them leave their temporary digs later that morning and board helicopters bound for oil rigs and gas platforms hundreds of miles out at sea.

Despite the ongoing risks of working offshore, it’s unlikely many will quit their posts. After all, this is a well-paid gig. Workers get two weeks off for every two worked. And salaries are usually more than double the national average.

The company has already said it could take “a couple of weeks” under the best-case scenario to halt the gas leak, which has prompted the evacuation of several offshore facilities and shut down around 130,000 barrels equivalent of oil and gas production. However, some of the fixes the company is discussing could take far longer.